Ian McEwan was born on 21
June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where
he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. While completing his MA
degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, he took a
creative writing course taught by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus
Wilson.

McEwan's works have earned
him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for
his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the
Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The
Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been
shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the
award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH
Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003),
Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the
European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James
Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday.

The film adaptation of
McEwan's novel Atonement was recently nominated for seven Golden Globe,
including:

Best Motion Picture (Drama)
Best Actress (Keira Knightley)
Best Actor (James McAvoy)
Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Saoirse Ronan)
Best Director (Joe Wright)
Best Screenplay (Christopher Hampton)
Best Original Score (Dario Marianelli)

Ian McEwan,
with a cool and lucid intelligence, confronts the hysteria and stupefaction of
the apocalyptic end times, what Christians call “The Rapture,” the desolate
death-wish that lurks hideously beneath subservience to religious faith.

End of the World
Blues: Lecture at Stanford University on June 25, 2007

I am going to talk about the end of the world, it concerns
you all. I’m going to really just be discussing the apocalypse in mostly
Christianity, necessarily centering somewhat on the States, touching on Islam
and Judaism. Anyway, it goes like this.

Since 1839, the world inventory of photographs has been
accumulating at an accelerating pace, multiplying into a near infinity of images
into a resemblance of a Borgesian library. This haunting technology has been
with us long enough now that we’re able to look at a crowd scene, a busy street
say in the late 19th century, and know for certain that every single
figure is dead. Not only the young couple pausing by a park railing, with the
child with a hoop and stick, the starchy nurse, the solemn baby upright in its
carriage - their lives having run their course and they are all gone. And yet
frozen in sepia, they appear curiously busily oblivious of the fact that they
must die. As Susan Sontag put it, “photographs state the innocence, the
vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction. Photography she
said is the inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest
a moment with posthumous irony, a phrase I have to say I very much like.
Photographs show people being so irrefutably there and at a specific age in
their lives. They group together people and things which a moment later have
already disbanded, changed; continued along the course of their independent
destinies.”

One day it could be the case with a photograph of us all
assembled here today in this hall. Imagine us scrutinised in an old photograph
200 years hence, idly considered by a future beholder as quaintly old fashioned,
possessed by the self evident importance of our concerns, ignorant of the date
and manner of our certain fate and long gone - long gone en masse. We’re all
well used to reflections on individual mortality - it is the shaping force in
the narrative of our existence. It emerges in childhood as a baffling fact,
re-emerges possibly in adolescence as a tragic reality which all around us
appear to be denying. Then perhaps fades in busy middle life to return, say in a
sudden premonitory bout of insomnia. One of the supreme secular meditations on
death is Larkin’s Aubade,

“The
sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always, not to be here,
not to anywhere and soon. Nothing more terrible, nothing more true.”

We confront our mortality in private conversations, in the
familiar constellations of religion – “that vast moth-eaten musical brocade,”
thought Larkin, “created to pretend we never die.” Aand we experience it as a
creative tension, an enabling paradox in our literature and art: What is
depicted, loved or celebrated cannot last and the work must try to outlive its
creator. Larkin after all is now dead. Unless we are a determined, well
organised suicide we cannot know the date of demise, but we know the date must
fall within a certain window of biological possibility, which as we age must
progressively narrow to its closing point.

Estimating the nature and timing of our collective demise,
not a lecture room full, but the end of a civilisation of the entire human
project is even less certain. It might happen in the next hundred years or not
happen in 2000, or happen within perceptible slowness, a whimper not a bang. But
in the face of that unknowability, there has often flourished powerful certainty
about the approaching end. Throughout recorded history, people have mesmerized
themselves with stories which predict the date and manner of our whole scale
destruction, often rendered meaningful by ideas of divine punishment and
ultimate redemption, the end of life on earth, the end or last days, end-time,
the apocalypse.

Many of these stories are highly specific accounts of the
future and our devoutly believed. Contemporary apocalyptic movements, Christian
or Islamic, some violent, some not, all appear to share fantasies of a violent
end and they affect our politics profoundly. The apocalyptic mind can be
demonising, that is to say there are other groups, other faiths that it despises
for worshipping false gods and these believers of course will not be saved from
the fires of hell and the apocalyptic mind tends to be totalitarian, which is to
say that these are intact, all encompassing ideas founded in longing and
supernatural belief immune to evidence or its lack, and well protected against
the implications of fresh data.

Consequently, moments of unintentional pathos, even comedy
arise and perhaps something in our nature is revealed as the future is
constantly having to be written, new Anti-Christ, new beasts, new Babylons, new
whores located, and the old appointments with doom and redemption quickly
replaced by the next. Not even a superficial student of the Christian apocalypse
could afford to ignore the work of Norman Cohn. His magisterial, The Pursuit
of the Millennium was published 50 years ago and has been in print ever
since. This is a study of a variety of end-time movements that swept through
Northern Europe between the 11th
and 16th Centuries. These sects generally inspired by the symbolism in the Book
of Revelation typically led by a charismatic prophet who emerged from among
the artisan class or from the dispossessed were seized by the notion of an
impending end, to be followed by the establishing of the Kingdom of God on
Earth. In preparation for this, it was believed necessary to slaughter Jews,
priests and property owners, fanatical rabbles, tens of thousands strong,
oppressed and often starting and homeless roam from town to town full of wild
hope and murderous intent. The authorities, church and lay would put down these
bands with overwhelming violence. A few years later or a generation later, with
a new leader and faintly different emphasis, a new group would rise up. It’s
worth rememberingthat
the impoverished mob that trailed behind the Knights of the First Crusades
started their journey by killing Jews in their thousands in the Upper Rhine
area. These days when Muslims of radical tendency pronounce their formulae of
imprecations against Jews and Crusaders, they would do well to remember that
both Jewry and Islam were victims of the Crusades.

These days the slaughter has abated but what strikes the
reader of Cohn’s book are the common threads that run between medieval and
contemporary apocalyptic thought. First and in general, the resilience of the
end-time forecasts, time and again for 500 years, the date is proclaimed,
nothing happens, no-one feels discouraged from setting another date. Second,
The Book of Revelation formed a literary tradition that kept alive in
Medieval Europe the fantasy derived from the Judaic tradition of divine
election. Christians too could now be the chosen people, the saved or the elect
and no amount of official repression could smother the appeal of this notion to
the underprivileged as well as the unbalanced. Third, there looms the figure of
a mere man apparently virtuous, risen to eminence but in reality seductive and
satanic. He is the Anti-Christ. In the five centuries that Cohn surveys the role
is fulfilled by the Pope, just as it frequently is now.

Finally there is the boundless adaptability, the undying
appeal and fascination of The Book of Revelation itself, the central text
of apocalyptic belief. When Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas making
landfall in the Bahaman Islands, he believed he had found and was fated to find
the terrestrial paradise promised in The Book of Revelation. He believed
himself to be implicated in God’s planning for the Millennial Kingdom on Earth.

The scholar, Daniel Wojcik quotes from Columbus’s account
of his first journey, “God made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new
earth of which he spoke in the apocalypse of St John and he showed me the spot
where to find it”. Five centuries later, the United States responsible for more
than four fifths of the world’s scientific research and still a land of plenty,
can show the world an abundance of opinion polls concerning its religious
convictions, the litany will be familiar. 90% of Americans say they have never
doubted the existence of God and are certain they will be called to answer for
their sins. 53% are creationists who believe that the cosmos is 6,000 years old.
44% are sure that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead within the
next 50 years and only 12% believe that life on earth has evolved from natural
selection without the intervention of a supernatural agency.

In general, belief in end-time biblical prophecy in a world
purified by catastrophe and then redeemed and made entirely Christian and free
of conflict by the return of Jesus in our lifetime is stronger in the United
States than anywhere on the planet and extends from marginal, ill-educated,
economically deprived groups to college educated people in their millions
through to governing elites to the very summits of power. The social scientist,
J W Nelson, notes, “That apocalyptic ideas are as American as hotdogs”. Wojcik
reminds us of the ripple of anxiety that ran around the world in April 1984 when
President Reagan expressed himself greatly interested in the biblical prophecy
of imminent Armageddon. To the secular mind, the polling figures have a
pleasantly shocking titillating quality. One might think of them as a form of
atheist’s pornography but perhaps we should enter a caveat before proceeding. It
might be worth retaining a degree of scepticism about these polling figures. For
a start, they vary enormously, one poll’s 90% is another 53%. From the
respondent’s point of view, what is to be gained by categorically denying the
existence of God to a complete stranger with a clipboard. And those who tell
pollsters they believe that the Bible is the literal word of God from which
derive all proper moral precepts are more likely to be thinking in general terms
of love, compassion and forgiveness rather than the slave owning ethnic
cleansing infanticide and genocide urged at various times by the jealous God of
the Old Testament.

Furthermore, the mind is capable of artful
compartmentalisations. In one moment a man might confidently believe in
predictions of Armageddon in his lifetime and in the next pick up the phone to
enquire about a savings fund for his grandchildren’s college education or
approve of long term measures to slow global warming, or even vote democrat, as
do many Hispanic biblical literalists. In Pennsylvania, Kansas and Ohio, the
courts have issued ringing rejections of intelligent design and voters have
ejected creationists from school boards. In the Dover case, this one round last
year, Judge Jones, John Jones III, a Bush appointee, handed down a judgment that
was not only a scathing dismissal of the prospect of supernatural ideas imported
into science classes, but it was an elegant stirring summary of the project of
science in general and of natural selection in particular and a sturdy
endorsement of the rationalist’s enlightenment values that underlie the
constitution.

Still, the Book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible
and perhaps its most bizarre, certainly one of its most luring remains very
important in the United States just as it once was in Medieval Europe. The book
is also known as the Apocalypse and we should be quite clear about the meaning
of this word which is derived from the Greek word for revelation. Apocalypse
which has become synonymous with catastrophe actually refers to the literary
form in which an individual describes what has been revealed to him by a
supernatural being. There was a long Jewish tradition of prophecy and there were
hundreds if not thousands of seers like John of Patmos between the 2ndcentury
BC and the 1st century AD. Many other Christian apocalypses were
deprived of canonical authority. In the 2nd Century AD, Revelation
most likely survived because its author was confused with John the Beloved
Disciple. It is not included in the Greek Orthodox Bible and it’s interesting to
speculate how different Medieval European history and indeed the history of
religion in Europe and the United States would have been if the Book of
Revelation had also failed as it very nearly did to be retained in the Bible we
now know.

The scholarly consensus dates Revelation to 95 or 96AD.
Little is known of its author beyond the fact that he is certainly not the
Apostle John. The occasion of writing appears to be the persecutions of
Christians under the Roman Emperor Domitian. Only a generation before the Romans
had sacked the second temple in Jerusalem and are therefore identified with the
Babylonians who had destroyed the first temple centuries earlier. The general
purpose was quite likely to give hope and consolation to the faithful in the
certainty that their tribulations would end, that the Kingdom of God would
prevail. Ever since the influential 12th Century historian, Joachim
of Fiore, Revelation has been seen within various traditions of gathering
complexity and divergence, as an overview of human history whose last stage we
are now in. Alternatively, and this is especially relevant to post-war United
States, as an account purely of those last days. For centuries, within the
Protestant tradition, the Anti-Christ was identified with the Pope, or with the
Catholic Church in general. In recent decades, the honour has been bestowed on
the Soviet Union, the European Union, or secularism and atheists. For many
millennial dispensationalists,international peacemakers who risk delaying the final struggle by sewing
concord among nations, the UN along with the World Council of Churches have also
been seen as satanic forces.

The cast or contents of Revelation in its contemporary
representations has all the colourful gaudiness of a children’s computer fantasy
game. Earthquake and fires, thundering horses and their riders, angels blasting
away on trumpets, magic vials, Jezebel, a red dragon and other mythical beasts
and a scarlet woman. Another familiar aspect is the potency of numbers, seven
each of seals, heads of beasts, candlesticks, stars, lamps, trumpets, angels and
vials. Then four riders, four beasts with seven heads, ten horns, ten crowns,
four and 20 elders, 12 tribes with 12,000 members and finally, most resonantly,
spawning 19th Centuries of dark tomfoolery, the quote, “Here is
wisdom, let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast, for it is
the number of a man and his number is six hundred, three score and six”. To many
minds, 666 bristles with significance. The internet is stuffed with tremulous
speculation about supermarket barcodes, implanted chips, numerical codes for the
names of world leaders. However, the oldest known record of this famous verse,
from the Oxyrhynchus site gives the number as 616 as does the Zurich Bible and I
have the impression that any number would have served well.

One senses in the arithmetic of prophecy, the yearnings of
a systematising mind bereft of the experimental scientific underpinnings that
was to give such human tendencies their rich expression many centuries later.
Astrology gives a similar impression of numerical obsession operating within a
senseless void. But Revelation has endured in an age of technology and
scepticism. Not many works of literature, not even the Odyssey of Homer
can boast such a wide appeal over such an expanse of time.

One celebrated case of this rugged durability is that of
William Miller, the 19th
Century farmer who became a prophet and made a set of intricate
calculations based on a line in verse 14 of the Book of Daniel, which goes,
“Unto 2,300 days then shall the sanctuary be cleansed”. Counting for various
reasons, this utterance to date from 457BC and understanding as many did one
prophetic day to be the equivalent of a year, Miller came to the conclusion that
the last of days would occur in 1843.Some of Miller’s followers refined the calculations further to October 22nd.
After nothing happened on that day, the year was quickly revised to 1844 to take
into account the year zero. The faithful Millerites gathered in their thousands
to wait. One may not share their beliefs but it is quite possible to understand
the mortifying disenchantment. One eyewitness wrote,

“We
confidently expected to see Jesus Christ and all the holy angels with him and
that our trials and sufferings with our earthly pilgrimage would close and we
should caught up to meet our coming Lord and thus we looked for our coming Lord
until the bell tolled 12 at midnight. The day had then passed and our
disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were
blasted and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before.
It seemed that the loss of all our earthly friends could have been no
comparison. We wept and wept till the day dawn.”

One means of dealing with the disillusionment was to give
it its title, it was known as The Great Disappointment - duly capitalised. More
importantly, according to Kenneth Newport’s impressive new account of the Waco
Siege, the very next day after the disappointment, one Millerite leader in Port
Gibson, New York by the name of Hiram Edson had a vision as he walked along, a
sudden revelation that the cleansing of the sanctuary referred to events not on
earth but in heaven. Jesus had finally taken his place in the heavenly holy or
holies. The date had been right all along, it was simply the place they had got
wrong. This master stroke as Newport calls it, this theological lifeline removed
the whole affair into a realm immune to disapproval. The Great Disappointment
was explained and many Millerites were drawn with hope still strong in their
hearts into the beginnings of the Seventh Day Adventist Movement which was to
become one of the most successful churches in the United States.

In passing, I note the connection between this church and
the medieval sects that Cohn describes. The strong emphasis on the Book of
Revelation, the looming proximity of the end, the strict division between the
faithful remnant who keep the Sabbath and those who join the ranks of the
fallen. Of the Anti-Christ identified with the Pope, whose title Vicarius Filii
Dei, Vicar of the Son of God, apparently had a numerical value of 666.

I mention Hiram Edson’s morning after master stroke to
illustrate the adaptability and resilience of end-time thought. For centuries
now, it has regarded the end as soon, if not next week then within a year or
two. The end has not come and yet no-one is discomforted for long. New prophets
and soon a new generation set about the calculations and always manage to find
the end looming within their own lifetime. The million sellers, like Hal
Lindsey, predicted the end of the world all through the 70s, 80s and 90s and
today business has never been better. There is a hunger for this news and
perhaps we glimpse here something in our nature, something of our deeply held
notions of time and of our own insignificance against the intimidating vastness
of eternity or the age of the universe, on the human scale there is very little
difference. We have need of a plot, a narrative to shore up our irrelevance in
the flow of things.

In the sense of an ending, Frank Commode suggests that the
enduring quality, the vitality of the Book of Revelation suggests a consonance
with our more naïve requirements of fiction. We are born as we will die in the
middle of things, in the midest. To make sense of our span, we need what he
calls fictive concords with origins and ends. The end in the grand sense as we
imagine it, will reflect our irreducibly intermediary expectations. So what
could grant us more meaning against the abyss of time then to identify our own
personal demise with the purifying annihilation of all that is. Commode quotes
with approval from Wallace Stevens, “The imagination is always at the end of an
era”. Even our notions of decadence contain the hopes of renewal. The religious
minded as well as the most secular looked on the transition to the Year 2000 as
inescapably significant. Even if all the atheists did was to party a little
harder, it was inevitably a transition, the passing of an old age into the new.
And who is to say now that Osama Bin Laden did not disappoint, whether we
mourned at the dawn of the new millennium with the bereaved among the ruins of
Lower Manhattan or danced with joy as some did in the Gaza Strip.

Islamic eschatology from its very beginnings embraced the
necessity of violently conquering the world and gathering up souls to the faith
before the expected hour of judgment. A notion that has risen and fallen over
the centuries but in past decades has received a new impetus from the Islamist
Revivalist Movement. It is partly a mirror image of the Protestant Christian
tradition that a world made entirely Islamic with Jesus as Mohammed’s Lieutenant
and partly a fantasy of the inevitable return of sacred space, the caliphate
that includes most of Spain, parts of France, the entire Middle East right up to
the borders of China. As with the Christian scheme, Islam foretells of the
destruction or conversion of the Jews. Prophecy belief in Judaism, the original
source for both Islamic and Christian eschatologies, is surprisingly weaker.
Perhaps a certain irony in the relationship between Jews and their God is
unfriendly to an end-time belief these days but it lives on vigorously enough in
the Lubavitch Movement and various Israeli settler groups and of course is
centrally concerned with divine entitlement to disputed lands.

We should add to the mix more recent secular apocalyptic
beliefs. The certainty that the world is inevitably doomed through nuclear
exchange, viral epidemics, meteorites, population growth or environmental
degradation. Where these calamities are posed as mere possibilities in an
open-ended future that might be headed off by wise human agency, we cannot
consider them as apocalyptic, they are minatory, they are calls to action. But
when they are presented as unavoidable outcomes driven by ineluctable forces of
history or innate human failings, they share much with their religious
counterparts though they do lack the demonising cleansing redemptive aspects and
are without the kind of supervision of a supernatural entity that might give
benign meaning and purpose to a mass extinction. Clearly fatalism is common to
both camps and both reasonably enough are much concerned with nuclear holocaust
which to the prophetic believers, illuminates in retrospect biblical passageways
that once seemed obscure. Hal Lindsey, pre-eminent among the popularisers of
American apocalyptic thought, writes,

“Zacharia 14.12 predicts that: “Their flesh will be consumed from their bones,
their eyes burned out of their sockets and their tongues consumed out of their
mouths while they stand on their feet””. For hundreds of years, he writes,
“Students of bible prophecy have wondered what kind of plague could produce such
instant ravaging of humans whilst still on their feet.” Until the event of the
atomic bomb, such a thing was not humanly possible but now everything Zacharia
predicted could come true in a thermo-nuclear exchange.”

Two other movements, now mercifully defeated or collapsed,
provide a further connection between religious and secular apocalypse, so
concluded Norman Cohn in the closing pages of the Pursuit of the Millennium.
The genocidal tendency among the apocalyptic medieval movements faded somewhat
after the 15th Century. Vigorous end-time belief continued of course
in the Puritan and Calvinist Movements, the Millerites that we have seen and in
the American Great Awakening, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Adventist
Movement. The murderous tradition however did not die away completely, it
survived the passing of centuries in various sects, various outrages, to emerge
in the European 20th Century transformed, revitalised, secularised
but still recognisable in what Cohn depicts as the essence of apocalyptic
thinking, the tense expectation of a final decisive struggle in which a world
tyranny will be overthrown by a chosen people. And through which the world will
be renewed and history brought to its consummation. The will of God was
transformed in the 20th Century into the will of history but the
essential demand remain as it still does today to purify the world by destroying
the agents of corruption. The dark reveries of Nazism about the Jews shared much
with the murderous antisemitic demonology of medieval times. An important
additional element imported from Russia was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
the 1905 Czarist Police Forgery elevated by Hitler and others into a racist
ideology. It’s interesting to note how the protocols have re-emerged as a
central text for Islamists frequently quoted on the websites and sold in street
bookstalls across the Middle East. The Third Reich and its dream of a thousand
year rule was derived in a former of secular millennial user patient directly
from the Book of Revelation.

Cohn draws our attention to the apocalyptic language of
Mein Kampf, “If our people fall victim to these Jewish tyrants of the nations
with their lust for blood and gold, the whole earth will sink down. If Germany
frees itself from this embrace, this greatest of dangers for the people can be
regarded as vanquished for all the earth”. In Marxism, in its Soviet form, Cohn
also found a continuation of the old millenarian tradition of prophecy of the
final violent struggle to eliminate the agents of corruption. This time it is
the Bourgeoisie who will be vanquished by the Proletariat in order the enable
the withering away of the State and usher in the peaceable Kingdom. “The Kulak
is prepared to strangle and massacre hundreds of thousands of workers, ruthless
war must be waged on the Kulaks, death to them”, thus spoke Lenin and his word
like Hitler’s became deed.

Thirty years ago we might have been able to convince
ourselves that contemporary religious apocalyptic thought was a harmless remnant
of a more credulous superstitious pre-scientific age now safely behind us, but
today prophecy belief particularly within the Christian and Islamic traditions
is a force in our contemporary history, a medieval engine driving our modern,
moral, geopolitical and military concerns. The various jealous sky-Gods and they
are certainly not one and the same God, who in the past directly addressed
Abraham, Paul or Mohammed among others, now indirectly address us through the
daily television news. These different Gods have wound themselves inextricably
round our politics and our political differences. Our secular and scientific
culture has not replaced or even thoroughly challenged these mutually
incompatible supernatural fault systems. Scientific methods, scepticism or
rationality in general has yet to find an overarching narrative of sufficient
power, simplicity and wide appeal to compete with the old stories that give
meaning to people’s lives. Natural selection is a powerful elegant and economic
explicator of life on earth in all its diversity and perhaps it contains the
seeds of a rival creation myth that would have the added power of being true but
it awaits its inspired synthesiser, its poet, its Milton.

The great American biologist, EO Wilson has suggested an
ethics divorce from religion and derived instead from what he calls biophilea,
our innate and profound connection to our natural environment, that one man
alone cannot make a moral system. Science may speak of probable rising sea
levels and global temperatures with figures that it constantly refines in line
with new data, that on the human future it cannot compete with the luridness and
above all with the meaningfulness of the prophecies in the Book of Daniel or
Revelation. Reason and myth remain uneasy bed fellows. Rather than presenting a
challenge, science has in obvious ways strengthened apocalyptic thinking. It has
provided us with the means to destroy ourselves and our civilisation completely
in less than a couple of hours or to spread a fatal virus around the globe in a
couple of days. Our spiralling technologies of destruction and their even
greater availability have raised the possibility that true believers with all
their unworldly passion, their prayerful longing for the end-times to begin,
could help nudge the ancient prophecies towards fulfilment. Daniel Wójcik in the
superb study that I mentioned earlier, Study of Apocalyptic thought in America,
quotes a letter by the singer, Pat Boone, addressed to fellow Christians.
All-out nuclear war is what he happens to have in mind. He says, “My guess is
there isn’t a thoughtful Christian alive who does not believe we are living at
the end of history. I don’t know how that makes you feel but it gets me pretty
excited. Just think about actually seeing as the Apostle Paul wrote it, “The
Lord himself descending from heaven with a shout”. Wow! And the signs that it’s
about to happen are everywhere.” If this possibility of a world nuclear
catastrophe appears too pessimistic or extravagant or hilarious, consider the
case of another of individual somewhat remote from Pat Boone, President
Ahmadinejad of Iran. His much reported remark about wiping Israel off the face
of the earth may have been mere bluster of the kind you could hear any Friday in
mosques around the world. But this posturing coupled with his nuclear ambitions
become a little more worrying when set in the context of his end-time beliefs.

In Jam Karan, a village not far from the Holy City of Qum,
a small mosque is undergoing a 20 million dollar expansion, driven forward by
Ahmadinejad’s Office. Within the Shiite apocalyptic tradition, the 12th
Imam, the Mahdi who disappeared in the 9th Century, is expected
to reappear in a well behind the mosque. His re-emergence will signify the
beginning of the end days. He will lead the battle against the Dajal, the
Islamic version of the Anti-Christ and with Jesus as its follower will establish
the global Dar Al Salam, the Dominion of Peace under Islam. Ahmadinejad is
extending the mosque to receive the Mahdi and already pilgrims in their
thousands are visiting the shrine for the President has reportedly told his
cabinet that he expects the visitation within two years. Consider the celebrated
case of the red heifer or calf. On the Temple Mount in Jerusalem the end-time
stories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam converge in both interlocking and
mutually exclusive ways that are potentially explosive. They form incidentally
the material for the American novelist, Bob Stone’s fine novel, The Damascus
Gate. What is bitterly contested is not only the past and present, it is the
future. It is hardly possible to do justice and summary to the complex
eschatologies that jostle on this 35 acre patch of land. The stories themselves
are familiar. For the Jews, the Mount, the biblical Mount Moriah is the site of
the first temple destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586BC and of the second temple,
destroyed by the Romans in 70AD. According to tradition, and of particular
interest to various controversial groups including the Temple Institute, the
Messiah when he comes at last, will occupy the third temple, but that cannot be
built and therefore the Messiah will not come without the sacrifice of a
perfectly unblemished red calf.

For Muslims of course, the Mount is the site of the Dome of
the Rock built over the location of the two temples and enclosing the very spot
from which Mohammed departed on his celebrated night journey to heaven, leaving
as he stepped upwards a revered footprint in the rock. In the prophetic
tradition, the Dajal will be a Jew who leads a devastating war against Islam.
Attempts to bless a foundation stone of a new temple are seen as highly
provocative of course, for it implies the destruction of the mosque.

The symbolism surrounding Arial Sharron’s visit to the
Mount in September 2000 remains a matter of profoundly different interpretation
by Muslim and Jews. If lives were not at stake, the Christian fundamentalist
contribution to this volatile mix would seem amusing cynical. These prophetic
believers are certain that Jesus will return at the height of the battle of
Armageddon but his thousand year reign which will ensure the conversion of Jews
and Muslims to Christianity or their extinction cannot begin until the third
temple is built. And so it comes about that a cattle breeding operation emerges
in Israel with the help of Texan, Christian fundamentalist ranchers to promote
the birth of the perfect unspotted red calf and thereby we have to assume bring
the end days a little closer. In 1997, there was great excitement as well as a
good deal of press mockery when one promising candidate appeared. Months later
this cherished young cow nicked its rump on a barbed wire fence causing white
hairs to grow at the site of the wound and earning instant disqualification.
Another red calf appeared in 2002 to general acclaim and then again later
disappointment. In the tight squeeze of history, religion and politics that
surround the Temple Mount, the calf is a minor item indeed but the search for it
and the hope and the longing that surround it illustrates the dangerous tendency
among prophetic believers to bring on the cataclysm that they think will lead to
a form of paradise on earth. The reluctance of the current US administration to
pursue in these past six years, a vigorous policy towards a peace settlement in
the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, may owe less to the pressures of Jewish groups
than to the eschatology of the Christian right.

Periods of uncertainty in human history of rapid
bewildering change and of social unrest appear to give these old stories greater
weight. It does not need a novelist to tell you that where a narrative has a
beginning, it needs an end. Where there is a creation myth, there has to be a
final chapter. Where a God makes the world, it remains in his power to unmake
it. When human wickedness or weakness is apparent, there will be guilty
fantasies of supernatural retribution. When people are profoundly frustrated
either materially or spiritually there will be dreams of the perfect society
where all conflicts are resolved and all needs are met. This much we can
understand or politely pretend to understand but the problem of fatalism
remains. In a nuclear age and in an age of serious environmental degradation,
apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger, a precarious logic of
self interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of
one nuclear state came to welcome or cease to fear mass death. The words of
Ayatollah Khomeini are quoted approvingly in an Iranian 11th grade
school textbook. Khomeini said, “Either we shake one another’s hands in joy at
the victory of Islam in the world or all of us will turn to eternal life in
martyrdom. In both case, victory and success are ours.” If we let global
temperatures continue to rise because we give houseroom to the faction that
believes it is God’s will, then we are truly and literally sunk.

If I were a believer, I suppose I’d prefer to be in Jesus’s
camp, he is reported by Matthew to have said, “No-one knows about that day or
hour, not even the angels in heaven nor the son, but only the father”. But even
a sceptic can find in the historical accumulation of religious expression, joy,
fear, love and above all a kind of seriousness. I return to Philip Larkin, an
atheist who also knew the moment and nature of transcendence and he once wrote a
famous description of a church,

“A
serious house on serious earth it is, in whose blent air all our compulsions
meet, are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be
obsolete, since someone will forever be surprising, a hunger in himself to be
more serious”.

And how could one be more serious than the writer of this
prayer for the internment of the dead from the Book of Common Prayer, an
incantation of bleak existential beauty, even more so in its beautiful setting
by Henry Purcell, “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and
is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he flee'th as it
were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.” Horribly revised in the modern
Bible I have to say.”

Ultimately apocalyptic belief is a function of faith, that
luminous inner conviction that needs no recourse to evidence. It’s customary to
pose against immoveable faith, the engines of reason, but in this instance I
would prefer another delightful human impulse, curiosity, the hallmark of mental
freedom. Organised religion has always had, and I put this mildly, a troubled
relationship with curiosity. Islam’s distrust at least in the past 200 years is
best expressed by its attitude to those whose faith falls away, to apostates who
are drawn to other religions or to none at all. In recent times, in 1975 the
Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Bin Baz in a fatwa quoted by (inaudible) ruled as
follows, “Those who claim that the earth is round and moving round the sun are
apostates and their blood can be shed and their property can be taken in the
name of God”. Ten years later he did finally rescind this judgment you’ll be
relieved to hear.

Mainstream Islamic routinely prescribes punishment for
apostates that range from ostracism to beatings to death. To enter one of the
many websites where Muslim apostates anonymously exchange views is to encounter
a world of brave and terrified men and women who have succumbed to their
disaffection or their intellectual curiosity and Christians should not feel
smug. The first commandment on pain of death if we were to take the matter
literally, is “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me”. In the 4th
Century, St Augustine put the matter well for Christianity and its view
prevailed for a long time. He wrote, “There is another form of temptation even
more fraught with danger, this is the disease of curiosity. It is this which
drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature which are beyond our
understanding which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to
learn.”. And yet it is curiosity, scientific curiosity, human curiosity that has
delivered us genuine testable knowledge of the world and contributed to our
understanding of our place within it and our nature and our condition. I would
argue that this knowledge has a beauty of its own and it can be terrifying. We
are barely beginning to grasp the implications of what we have relatively
recently learned. And what exactly have we learned. I’m drawing here and
adapting somewhat an essay Steven Pinker wrote for his ideal of a university.
Among other things we have learned that our planet is a minute speck in an
inconceivably vast cosmos; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of
the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the
activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are
methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which
violate commonsense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and small; that
precious and widely held beliefs when subjected to empirical tests are often
cruelly falsified but we cannot create energy or use it without loss.

As things stand after more than a century of direct or
indirect research in a number of fields we have no evidence at all that the
future can be predicted or projects any traces into the presence. Better to look
directly to the past, to its junkyard of unrealised futures for it is curiosity
about history that should give end-time believers reasonable pause when they
reflect that they stand on a continuum, a long and unvarying thousand year
tradition that has fantasised imminent salvation for themselves and perdition
for the rest. On one of the countless end-time rapture sites that litter the
Web, there is a section devoted to frequently asked questions. One is, when the
Lord comes, what will happen to the children of other faiths? The answer is,
you’ll be glad to know, is staunch. Ungodly parents only bring judgment to their
children. In the light of this, one might conclude that end-time faith is
probably immune to the lessons of history as it is to fundamental human decency.
If we do destroy ourselves, we can assume that the general reaction will be
terror and grief with the pointlessness of it all rather than rapture. Within
living memory, we have come very close to extinguishing our civilisation when in
October 1962 Soviet ships carrying nuclear warheads to installations in Cuba
confronted a blockade by the US Navy and the world waited to discover whether
Kruschev would order his convoy home.

I think it’s remarkable how little of that terrifying event
survives in public memory, in modern folklore that is. In the vast literature,
the crisis spawned military, political, diplomatic, there is very little on it’s
effect at the time on ordinary lives; in homes, schools and the workplace; on
the fear and widespread numb incomprehension in the population at large. The
fear has not passed into the national narrative here or anywhere else as vividly
as you might expect. One historian put it, “When the crisis ended, most people
turned their attention away as swiftly as a child who lifts up a rock, sees
something slimy underneath and drops the rock back”. Perhaps the assassination
of President Kennedy the following year helped obscure the folk memory of the
missile crisis, the murder in Dallas became a marker in the history of
instantaneous globalised news transmission. A huge proportion of the world’s
population seemed to be able to recall where they were when they heard the news
and typically conflating these two events, Christopher Hitchin opened an essay
on the Cuban Missile Crisis with the words, “Like everyone else of my generation
I can remember exactly where I was standing and what I was doing on the day that
President John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly killed me”. Heaven did not beckon
during those tense hours of the crisis, instead as Hitchin observes, it brought
the world to the best viewers had yet of the gates of hell.

I began with the idea of photography as the inventory of
mortality and I’ll end with a photograph of a group death. It shows fierce
flames and smoke rising from a building in Waco, Texas at the end of a 51 day
siege in 1993. The group inside was the branch Davidians, an offshoot of the
Seventh Day Adventists. Its leader, David Koresh, was a man steeped in biblical
end-time theology, convinced that America was Babylon, the agent of Satan come
in the form of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI to
destroy the Sabbath keeping remnant. It would emerge from the cleansing suicidal
fire to witness the dawn of a new kingdom. Here is Susan Sontag’s posthumous
irony indeed, as Medieval Europe recreated itself in the form of charismatic
man, a Messiah, a messenger of God, the bearer of the perfect truth who
exercised sexual power over his female followers and persuaded them to bear his
children in order to begin a Davidian line. In that grim inferno, children,
their mothers and other followers died. Even more died two years later when
Timothy McVeigh exacting revenge against the government for its attack on Waco
committed his slaughter in Oklahoma City. It is not for nothing that one of the
symptoms in a developing psychosis noted and described by psychiatrists is
“religiosity.”

Have we really reached the stage in public affairs when it
really is no longer too obvious to say that all the evidence of the past and all
the promptings of our precious rationality suggests that our future is not
fixed? We have no reason to believe that there are dates inscribed in heaven or
hell, we may yet destroy ourselves, we may scrape through. Confronting that
uncertainty is the obligation of our maturity, our only spur to wise action. The
believers should know in their hearts by now that even if they are right and
there actually is a benign and watchful personal God, he is as all the daily
tragedies, all the dead children attest, a very reluctant intervener. The rest
of us in the absence of any evidence to the contrary know that it is highly
improbable that there is anyone up there at all. Either way, it hardly matters
who is wrong, there will be no-one to save us but ourselves.